A post was split to a new topic: Arpeggio Picking Critiquey
I found the Anton video where he analyzes some popular guitarists playing technique pretty offensive.
I’m not really a Guthrie fan though I like a couple of his songs like Waves and also Last Orders (which has no real shredding in it save for a few seconds) from the Aristocrats but talking about him like he is such an inferior player or picker because his hands may not always be in perfect sync based on what Anton thinks is correct picking just sounds like Jealousy and putting someone down. Playing that lick quite un-musically over and over like that means something. Let’s hear you play the whole song and how that sounds. He says he won’t be able to improve it’s a shame it’s been too long or words to that effect. Please.
And I’m not really a MAB fan either, but he sound pretty fast and clean here.
Anton often sounds robotic to me. His picking strokes all sound the same which is pretty heavily accented. He vibrato sounds downright tweedly at times, always has, he’s no Yngwie Malmsteen that’s for sure, let alone someone with really good vibrato, forget about virtuoso level.
And what has he done? Does he have any good original work? He’s a pick technician. I was impressed when he was younger and he did that Paul Gilbert lick with one hand. He does have immense skill in certain spheres but I don’t know to me he doesn’t always come off sounding very musical.
And you run into this a lot. Take the guitar out of it. But those who think because they have some skill in an area or because something works very well for them that it is always the right way for everyone. And this is backed up with so called selected and suggested scientific evidence so it has to be right. He’s got the secret answer it just costs this. There are some people for whatever reason there may be … anatomical differences or neurological differences and this and that, who cannot do some perfect universal system. What he does may not work for someone else. This is a basic truth. What works for one may not for another. And we sometimes/often think we know something until we learn later that we didn’t have it quite right.
Anyway, I don’t think he is all that. I’d rather listen to some of the stuff Marty Friedman plays over what he does any day even if he bangs into other strings or his wrist is deviated.
Hi @tomsters , welcome to the forum and thanks for stopping by!
Not sure if you are aware since you are new, but we had a lot of trouble here with these kinds of conversations where people started talking about the person rather than the techniques / music etc.
Sorry if this sounds a bit censor-y but can I kindly ask you to edit away from your post comments about the guy’s personality, and only comment on the guitar stuff?
For the record: it’s totally ok to talk about aspects you like / don’t like about someone’s technique, provided it’s done respecfully. But after a few years of moderation we learned that it’s best not to start a debate about the person, it’s a slippery slope that tends to derail the conversation in non-constructive directions.
Thanks for the understanding, and I hope you do stick around 
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You must read all the comments first before posting something like this.
You totaly missed the point of Anton’s vid.
He respects all those players (they are in his top list) and his vid has nothing to do with their musicality.
It’s all just about picking technique, and he shows that those different techniques also have their limitations.
Anton shows with his own hands (not just words) that he can play anything those top players are doing in a even cleaner way with his technique; you can’t argue with that!
If you like his playing or not is completely irrelevant.
Anton found a way of which he believes is a universal one and has an academy where you can learn his way.
You can’t say that it won’t work for everyone because it may well do so.
His example in the beginning of the vid, where he shows all the different physics of those top swimmers using all the exact same technique to get the best results, was an eyeopener for me.
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Wow! Nice job Troy! It was really nice one and a half seconds in 170bpm pure 1nps which is simply stunning for a guitar player. I’m still struggling with 120, hope that one day I’ll be struggling with 150bpm. You touched unwanted strings 4-5 times, but i don’t think it makes much difference for usual listener who’s not crazy about clean playing. Anyways people who are not musicians don’t care
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Look folks, we’ve been up and down this topic a million times and I have been super transparent with you all about the challenges of running a forum. I’m going to be transparent again.
This post is the exactly type we struggle with. In order to not bog down this thread, I’ve created a new one with some thoughts. Go here to check it out and help us run the forum better:
@tomsters sorry to call you out here. You are not aware of the history and walked into this one. I’m redirecting to the other thread on this.
Thank you!
Has anyone had luck with keeping the wrist + forearm loose utilising the antagonist relationship as discussed in the video and demonstrated by PG?
As @Troy has mentioned, perhaps what we’re seeing in AO and PG is related to their long arms/big hands. Would a shorter arm/smaller hand even look like this with the same motion?
When I do this with a relaxed arm, the wrist and forearm do appear to work together in an opposing/antagonistic way. Is this really different or advantageous to keeping the forearm more stiff, and isolating the movement to the wrist alone like in the table top (lottery scratchy) example?
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The discussion about antagonistic muscle activation was related to something that occurs internally when you use deviation wrist motion, which is a particular direction of the wrist joint. Meaning, it’s something that happens when you try to move the wrist sideways. It’s not something you can “do” or “not do” with other motions, and it can’t be avoided by being “loose”. Even if this is happening, it’s not entirely clear what practical effect this has on what most people want to play, since there are many examples of players using this motion (Molly Tuttle) who are very good at the kind of “hard” phrases people like to fuss over.
More generally, I know I’m guilty of the anatomical nerdery but that type of discussion on here is just a window into how we develop teaching methods. It’s really not something most people should worry about when trying to learn picking technique.
The real goal is always to arrive at advice which is simple and easy to implement — tap on a table, go fast, try this phrase, etc. With that in mind, if you haven’t yet experimented with the three wrist forms in the Primer, and going fast on the kinds of phrases you want to play, then everything else is a distant second place in terms of worrying about it. There are only so many ways to anchor on a guitar and only so many ways to move. All these wrist techniques (with or without various extra stuff like forearm motion) all start with those forms and all start with going fast to get in the ballpark quickly.
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Listen to his playing here where he does the Paganini Caprice with a clean sound. Great dynamics from very soft to harder picking.
And here’s some own material. Everything played with great feel, far from what you call “Robotic”.
Awesome playing by Anton as usual!
Let’s avoid the confrontational tone please!
Tomsters walked into this conversation without knowing about the s£%^$-storm that affected it (and the website has currently some problems with hyperlinks, so that it can be difficult to navigate long threads). He has been very understanding of the situation after that post (see the moderation discussion in “site feedback”).
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You should as well. It only takes a few minutes to scan the thread I created on our challenges with tamping down negative energy here on the forum. As others smarter than me have pointed out, it’s really about tone and intent, and realizing that others will have opinions you may not share, and not taking it personally. The flag button is there for anything really crosses a line and we will be responsive as always.
Now I will apologize for sounding snippy. But we have spent a huge amount of energy on this topic of the past week or so.
Thanks.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Critiquing techniques vs critiquing people: what speech is permissible?
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s me again. I’ve been in Anton’s school for quite a big time in the past and I think I have to disagree with some statements in this thread.
Troy said “Meaning, it’s something that happens when you try to move the wrist sideways. It’s not something you can “do” or “not do” with other motions, and it can’t be avoided by being “loose”. Even if this is happening, it’s not entirely clear what practical effect this has on what most people want to play, since there are many examples of players using this motion (Molly Tuttle) who are very good at the kind of “hard” phrases people like to fuss over.”
It wasn’t said on correct motions, it was about positions when the energy from compression can be used for the next motion and the more you tense muscles, the less energy from that physical effect you can use. Just physics. And Anton was working on unblocking that area in the forearm since everyone’s right hand is tensed neutrally. All beginners are tensed. I saw it millions of times in his school.
It wasn’t about playing “hard” phrases, it was about stamina. Want to play hard phrases not for 1-2 seconds, but minutes? + clean + fast? You can’t do it when you’re tired, am i right? I think so. That’s the way to go. So we can see what it is for. It’s very clear.
Troy also said there’s no really helpful information in his video, it’s just a video to talk about? I’m sorry, but it is either jealousy or intentional disinformation, I didn’t think Troy would say something that weird, even one part of explanation in which positions you can achieve better stamina and why is already much more helpful for guitar players than most instructional videos on YouTube.
So I think it’s totally wrong to call it not helpful and even abusive to Anton’s teaching, since none of forum members can play like him. Still. We can bla bla bla even more, he’s still gonna be the only one who’s proving his words with playing.
Also Troy’s is pretty confident in “start fast” statements, you people go and try to find him saying “i think so” when Troy recommends someone to do so, exactly, there’s no doubt in that, Anton says the opposite. But still Troy says we can’t really know what Anton’s antagonistic muscle thing does. Confident in his own thing, not sure in Anton’s statements. Interesting, isn’t it? 
Even knowing that Anton’s synchronization, speed+accuracy is matchless. There’s no other who can do things he can with that accuracy. I haven’t seen any guitar player like him.
I think this forum needs a lot more words like “i think so”, instead of “you should do it this way”. Maybe even Anton should
say it more often (I think so), but he can show it unlike any of us here. So I guess he has a right to do so being the only one who proves things. His technique is perfect. Until any of us perfect in all aspects, we can’t say any statement is true. This will make this forum more kind and respectful place if all of us will start our messages from “i think so”.
But still all we have here is strange. Ok.
Last thing I should say.
I think so lol
I don’t think there is quite the degree of opposition here that you think there is.
Troy says there is no point doing the work on slow accuracy until you know you have a motion that works at speed.
Anton wants you to do the work on slow accuracy with a motion that he already knows works at speed.
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Bingo. And more generally, I think that all musical instrument instruction is getter better and more evidence-based over time. So I think we’ll see even more convergence toward similar ideas as the ideas that work start to crowd out the ideas that don’t. Nobody is going to be willing to sit there doing something if they suspect there’s a better way. See, the internet isn’t all cat videos and arguments. It can do some good too!
“Does universal jumping into box technique exist? I will analyze the stamina, meowing, and speed of several great cats posted all over the Internet…”
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For context, there was a section in Anton’s latest video where he spends a few minutes talking about the benefits of antagonistic muscles.
I queued it to where it starts, it goes on for about 7 minutes. I came away from that part thinking it was pretty integral to his system. He mentioned improper technique and tension could get in the way of allowing this natural function of opposing muscle groups to help each other out. So there is always a muscle that’s recuperating but gets sort of an elastic aid from the other muscle. He even does a little demo showing his wrist bouncing, naturally. Then applies just a little tension, and the bounce stops. I took the point as, if we’re inhibiting this natural process, our stamina will suffer. Because rather than letting the natural elastic action happen, we have to apply more effort by some other means (brute force). Which will work! But just for not as long, then we burn out.
This is all interesting to me because I had classical training at Peabody and they were VERY fussy about positions , angles and range of motion. My teacher specifically mentioned finding the middle of the range of motion for nearly every joint we’d move. Anton’s approach feels very “classical” to me. Just from the free videos I’ve seen, that’s my impression. I fully realize we’re all different anatomically, but isn’t finding a position and a motion like this pretty important? Or are you just of the opinion that if we get that “fast and smooth” movement that doesn’t burn out, that we’ve taken care of this and the antagonistic muscle groups are indeed working as designed. In other words, nothing to worry about or try to do, because a fast smooth motion is fast and smooth because the system is working as designed.
Swamped and no time to wade into the technical of the Anton stuff. I will just say that anyone who talks about relaxed body posture and the “right” way to do something is going to sound familiar to you because of your classical background. I can comment on that aspect somewhat.
Whether classical teaching is technically correct, who knows. I think it’s more likely that it is correct sometimes, but suffers from severe selection bias since the only people allowed in are people that can pass an audition proving they can already do it. I have personally interviewed Juilliard instructors like Noa Kageyama and we specifically discussed this. Every person walking in the door there can already play the highest level of difficult pieces. Nobody is there to actually learn how to play their instrument from scratch. So we don’t know what methods would actually work on an unfiltered population. Two, we talked about how he had to “trial and error” his way into a certain pizzicato technique that just wasn’t being taught for a Paganini piece.
Ergo, there doesn’t really seem to be a huge amount of data gathering going on in those circles. Conservatories are not research labs. I’m not saying they’re wrong, I’m just saying, we can’t assume they are right just because they are famous, care about the right things (comfort, efficiency), and have said certain things.
Again, cannot comment on the Anton stuff. But as for our own teaching, regardless of what technique you want to do, you need a way to test that it is actually working. You can have the absolute most correct, most detailed instruction in the world, but you still have to actually do it, and then you have to recognize when it is correct in order to repeat it. I know of no way of doing this aside from testing for speed and smoothness first. If there is another way, I am all ears. And picks!
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Great answer! Thanks! I mainly wanted to flag it since it was a key part of that video, not just some offshoot conversation this thread spawned
Your answer makes sense though. Correct instruction does not translate to the student being able to do it. Even the classical instruction I had…it was not magic. I could not do what that man told me to do in the beginning lol! I had to work pretty hard to get things to where he said I’d gotten it, then we could move on.
Also, while we’re on this subject of gathering information, I’m not sure how many people know this. I have mentioned it on occasion but I’ll mention this again because it seems germane to the subject of what kind of expertise we trust and why.
These ideas about starting with speed and randomness are not opinions or things I plucked out of thin air. They were the result of reading actual published motor learning research in combination with lots of testing and trial and error with our own students.
On top of that, I actually presented these ideas to no less than two motor learning research labs as a part of our interviews — Pietro’s group at Columbia University and again at the University of North Carolina Raleigh-Durham during the speed research. I also gave this presentation publicly at the Larvik Guitar Festival in Norway and took questions afterward. Robben Ford sat through it! Hilariously.
The presentations included slides with graphs of how I think the process works, and video clips of players interviews with actual closeup footage. There was a healthy amount of audience participation as the various rooms full of PhDs tried to guess where I was going with all this. It was fun and a bit surreal.
Not only did they not laugh me out of the room, but in discussions afterward they mentioned research papers which support the stuff that I was talking about, some of which were the papers I had actually read as part of coming up with these ideas in the first place. The Maurice Smith paper in particular, which I’ve talked about now in various Primer lessons, is a big one. Check the beginner tremolo case study if you’re interested in learning more.
So I get it that we’re all dummies out here in UserLand, flying by the seat of our pants to try and come up with stuff that’s going to work to help people learn better. But I would like to think that more so than anyone else in this field of, let’s call it, popular guitar instruction, I have gone farther in terms of interfacing with actual science and scientists, vetting our work by presenting to experts, and verifying through observing, testing, and refining that we’re actually on to something. I built a high speed camera mount too because the data is where it all begins.
I mention this all because I think we need to get away from this idea that you have to be the best guitar player to be right about guitar. You don’t. You just have to be right about stuff to be right about stuff. There is a process for determining this that does not depend on picking technique or celebrity.
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